It is generally known that conventional X-ray, IR-ray, UV-ray, and other types of imaging systems experience a beam or ray scattering effect when the beam impinges upon a high density object within the object being examined. This scattering normally causes several problems including a blurring or reduction in the definition of the information in the final picture, such as the negative in a standard X-ray film.
Several attempts have been made to solve or reduce the effects of scattering problems. One such attempt includes the use of a Potter-Buck grid comprising a large number of X-ray opaque material strips interspaced by thin slices of X-ray transparent material. Although not truly a grid, the apparatus is commonly called a "Buckie-Grid" or "Buckies" in the art. Buckies function to allow most X-rays along the incident direction to penetrate to the film surface but block those scattered rays coming at an angle to the grid orientation plane.
Buckies, however, fail to solve the scattering problem because the strips fail to absorb all the scattered ray energy and they often absorb too much of the non-scattered radiation causing a picture quality degradation. Increasing radiation energy levels to compensate for the grid absorption causes other problems that require solution.
Another attempt to deal with the scattering problem appears in U.S. Pat. No. 4,342,914, issued Aug. 3, 1982 to P. J. Bjorkholm. Bjorkholm purports to disclose a system that generates signals representative of a picture using a scanning X-ray beam but Bjorkholm fails to separate the non-scattered from the scattered radiation.